I know nothing about GIS, but I have what I think is a GIS problem. From spending a few hours googling my problem, I think what I need to do is perform a spatial query, but I'm not sure how to go about it.

Essentially, I have some crime data (a list of specific incidents, the time date that they occurred and the address where they occurred) that I'd like to look at in relation to one particular neighborhood. I have an outline of the neighborhood on a map, which is specific enough that I could translate it into a polygon that describes the outline of the neighborhood. I'd like to filter the crime data I have to see which specific incidents happened within the bounds of this neighborhood. I think this is a spatial query, but I'm not sure.

I'm looking for some guidance on the problem in general. It appears that there are some free tools online for these kinds of things (Google Fusion Tables?) and I have access to ArcGIS and MS SQL Server. I'm familiar with SQL Server, but not ArcGIS and it doesn't look like something I could pick up and learn in a day or two, but I'm not sure.

Again, any guidance, no matter how general or specific, is appreciated.

Sounds like a good idea, I put in a request to have ArcGIS installed on my desktop, I'll give this a shot as soon as I can. Thanks.
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ElbelchoMay 6 '11 at 13:47

After the ArcGIS stage you could even just export to Excel to filter the data.
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Matthew SnapeMay 6 '11 at 14:12

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If you don't already have the points on the map you will need to geocode them first, to get a coordinate for the address.
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Brad NesomMay 6 '11 at 15:52

To follow up: I used this method and it worked great. I had a hard time figuring out a few intermediate steps, like drawing the outline of the neighborhood on a sat view, converting that drawing to a feature and then geocoding the addresses, but once that was handled, "Select By Location" was exactly what I needed and resulted in an easy to understand, easy to export data set that fits my needs perfectly. Thanks!
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ElbelchoMay 10 '11 at 13:36

In your crime incident table you are going to need some information that connects to your neighborhood. Your neighborhood polygon doesn't contain all the addresses within it so your best bet would be to either A) get some street, parcel or building data that contains addresses that match your list or B) open up your crime table and add a column for neighborhood. then select the address within your neighborhood and populate the name/ID of the neighborhood it matches (this means you have to add a column in your neighborhood polygon and add the same ID)
Basically you need to have a way to let the spatial query know that these addresses belong to this neighborhood.
Since your table is not a point feature class (I assume) you will have to do a join based on the table. To do this you open ArcMap, click add features, browse to find your table and neighborhood, right click on your neighborhood, click join> and follow the prompts to join attributes from a table.

Well, that's the problem, the crime data is for the whole city, and I want to filter it down so that I can see which specific crime incidents happened in this neighborhood.
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ElbelchoMay 6 '11 at 13:46

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Do you have any other GIS data? Do you have parcels or streets?
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Meg McGMay 6 '11 at 14:56